by Alex Kershaw
3 According to Levai, Wallenberg also sent a letter to Koloman Lauer on December 8, in which he described the terrible conditions in Budapest and asked him to inquire with his uncle Jacob Wallenberg about a job at Huvudsta. Levai, p. 224.
4 Raoul Wallenberg, Letters and Dispatches, 1924-1944, p. 277.
5 Danny Smith, Lost Hero, p. 87.
6 Per Anger, With Raoul Wallenberg in Budapest, p. 64.
7 Christian Ungvary, The Siege of Budapest, p. 3.
8 Anna Porter, Kasztner’s Train, p. 283.
9 Theo Tschuy, Dangerous Diplomacy, p. 217.
10 John Bierman, Righteous Gentile, pp. 107-108.
11 Ibid.
12 Elenore Lester, Wallenberg, p. 117. Only a few hundred of the thousands of Germans left behind to fight the Soviets would survive.
13 Christian Ungvary, Siege of Budapest, p. 292.
14 Ibid. p. 300.
15 Jeno Levai, Raoul Wallenberg, p. 172.
16 Janos Beer, interview with the author.
17 Erwin Koranyi, interview with the author.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN. THE INFERNO
1 Veres remembered Wallenberg being cautious and taking great care to avoid unnecessary confrontations with the SS and Arrow Cross. He maximized the advantages and protections that came with diplomatic status. Veres recalled how the car Wallenberg used “bore a series of distinguishing signs, from ‘courier service’ to ‘diplomatic corps,’ and other inscriptions and insignia. The rear number plate was different from the front one. When it came to showing our documents, we used the one we thought was best. To the Arrow Cross, ‘courier service,’ to the German Nazis, ‘diplomat.’” Added Veres, “Wallenberg remarked, laughing on one occasion, that one ought to devise number plates that could by pushing a button be changed automatically to suit the occasion.” Jeno Levai, Raoul Wallenberg, p. 175.
2 Sharon Linnea, Raoul Wallenberg: The Man Who Stopped Death, The Jewish Publication Society, Philadelphia, 1993, pp. 132-133.
3 Just five soup kitchens provided a watery soup that was all most people lived on. Conditions behind the high, obscenity-daubed wooden fences that surrounded the ghetto were hellish indeed, as one eyewitness described them: “In narrow Kazicnzy Street, enfeebled men, dropping their heads, were pushing a wheelbarrow. On the rattling contraption, naked human bodies as yellow as wax were jolted along, and a stiff arm with black patches was dangling and knocking against the spokes of the wheel. People were squatting or kneeling around a dead horse and hacking the meat off it with knives. The animal’s head was lying a few meters away. The yellow and blue intestines, jellylike and with a cold sheen, were bursting out of the opened and mutilated body.” Christian Ungvary, The Siege of Budapest, p. 299.
4 Thurston Clarke and Frederick E. Werbell, Lost Hero, p. 129.
5 Ibid.
6 Christian Ungvary, The Siege of Budapest, p. 292.
7 Thurston Clarke and Frederick E. Werbell, Lost Hero, p. 130.
8 Ibid., p. 133.
9 Jeno Levai, Raoul Wallenberg, p. 231.
10 Christian Ungvary, The Siege of Budapest, p. 288.
11 Ibid. p. 278.
12 Christian Ungvary, The Siege of Budapest, p. 292-293. Ungvary’s book is the best account of the siege and its effect on civilians and soldiers alike.
13 Erwin K. Koranyi, Dreams and Tears, p. 86.
14 Erwin Koranyi, interview with the author. One of Erwin Koranyi’s aunts and her son had meanwhile died on the death march. “It was two hundred miles in pouring rain,” recalled Erwin Koranyi. “People who stayed behind were shot. Wallenberg had tried to pick up as many people as he could. But there was only so many he could save.”
15 Erwin K. Koranyi, Dreams and Tears, p. 88.
16 Erwin Koranyi, interview with the author.
17 Ibid.
18 Benjamin Balshone, Determined, p. 101.
19 Marianne Lowy, interview with the author.
20 Jeno Levai, Raoul Wallenberg, pp. 204-205.
21 Erwin K. Koranyi, Dreams and Tears, p. 89.
22 Ibid., p. 90.
23 Erwin K. Koranyi, Dreams and Tears, p. 90.
24 Erwin Koranyi, interview with the author.
25 Alan Levy, Nazi Hunter, p. 194.
26 Erwin K. Koranyi, Dreams and Tears, p. 90.
27 Marianne Lowy, interview with the author.
28 According to the Hungarian historian Jeno Levai, who experienced the siege of Budapest and was under Swedish protection that winter: “It [was] of the utmost importance that the Nazis and the Arrow Cross men were not able to ravage unhindered—they were compelled to see that every step they took was being watched and followed by the young Swedish diplomat. From Wallenberg, they could keep no secrets. Wallenberg was the ‘world’s observing eye,’ the one who continually called the criminals to account. That is the great importance of Wallenberg’s struggle in Budapest.” Source: Per Anger, With Raoul Wallenberg in Budapest, p. 84.
29 Vera Goodkin, interview with the author.
30 Jeno Levai, Raoul Wallenberg, p. 277.
31 Agnes Adachi, Child of the Winds, p. 37.
32 Ibid.
33 Jeno Levai, Raoul Wallenberg, p. 178.
34 Ibid.
35 Agnes Adachi, Child of the Winds, p. 37.
36 Source: http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/media_oi.php?lang=en&ModuleId=10005211&MediaId=1077.
37 Agnes Adachi, Child of the Winds, p. 43-44.
38 Per Anger, With Raoul Wallenberg in Budapest, p. 77.
39 Ibid.
40 Jeno Levai, Raoul Wallenberg, p. 162.
41 Lars Berg, The Book That Disappeared, p. 50.
42 Jeno Levai, Raoul Wallenberg, p. 170.
43 Dr. Gyory Wilhelm, who had been involved in rescue activities with Wallenberg, greeted Wallenberg at the house on January 11, 1945. “I’d like to stay here a few days,” an exhausted Wallenberg told him. “I don’t feel very secure in my other houses and apartments, and I also think that this district will be among the first in central Pest to be liberated by the Russians. I want to make contact with them as soon as possible so I can begin relief activities on behalf of the Jews.” Frederick E. Werbell and Thurston Clarke, Lost Hero, p. 137.
44 Jeno Levai, Raoul Wallenberg, p. 208.
45 Ibid., p. 209.
46 Ibid.
47 Frederick E. Werbell and Thurston Clarke, Lost Hero, p. 142.
48 Source: http://info.jpost.com/C001/Supplements/Shoah/hol_Missing. html. The decision had apparently already been taken in the Kremlin to bring Wallenberg to the capital for further interrogation. It has been alleged that a Soviet spy in the Swedish Embassy, Count Michael Tolstoy-Kutusov, had reported to Moscow that Wallenberg supplied the OSS with intelligence while also feeding information to senior Wehrmacht and SS officers. As a result, the Soviets may have suspected that Wallenberg was a double agent playing all sides, working for his OSS handler Iver Olsen and for the Germans. That Wallenberg could have done so to save lives does not appear to have occurred to the NKVD. In their jaundiced eyes, humanitarian action was always a front for other business.
49 Elenore Lester, Wallenberg: The Man in the Iron Web, p. 9.
50 Jeno Levai, Raoul Wallenberg, p. 213.
51 Ibid., p. 215.
52 Ibid.
53 Frederick E. Werbell and Thurston Clarke, Lost Hero, pp. 144-145.
54 Jeno Levai, Raoul Wallenberg, p. 215.
55 Ibid.
56 Frederick E. Werbell and Thurston Clarke, Lost Hero, p. 147.
57 Jeno Levai, Raoul Wallenberg, p. 216.
58 Four out of five Hungarian Jewish children were killed during the Holocaust.
59 Theo Tschuy, Dangerous Diplomacy, p. 217.
60 Frederick E. Werbell and Thurston Clarke, Lost Hero, p. 141.
61 To this day, according to the Guinness Book of Records, Wallenberg holds the record for the number of lives saved from extinction by any one person. According to the Hungarian historian Jeno Levai, who was the first to document Wallenberg’s rescue efforts in a
1947 book, “Wallenberg was the only neutral diplomat who never tried to save only the Swedish [protected Jews] but all sufferers equally.” Source: Jeno Levai, Raoul Wallenberg, p. 150.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN. LIBERATION
1 Vera Goodkin, interview with the author.
2 Jeno Levai, Raoul Wallenberg, p. 210.
3 Erwin Koranyi, interview with the author.
4 Erwin K. Koranyi, Dreams and Tears, p. 97.
5 Ibid., p. 98.
6 Ibid.
7 Erwin Koranyi, interview with the author.
8 Erwin K. Koranyi, Dreams and Tears, p. 103.
9 Ibid., p. 104.
10 Ibid.
11 Christian Ungvary, The Siege of Budapest, p. 355.
12 Marianne Lowy, interview with the author.
13 Ibid.
14 Ibid.
15 Benjamin Balshone, Determined, p. 109.
16 Marianne Lowy, interview with the author.
17 Vera Goodkin, interview with the author.
18 Ibid.
19 Ibid.
20 Vera Goodkin, In Sunshine and Shadow, p. 59.
21 Christian Ungvary, The Siege of Budapest, p. 346.
22 Ibid., p. 581. According to Christian Ungvary, by April 12, 1945, 8,200 “fascist and other reactionary elements” would have been arrested. Only 1,608 of them were released. Source: Christian Ungvary, ibid., p. 368.
23 Erwin Koranyi, interview with the author.
24 Anne Applebaum, Gulag, p. 432.
25 Christian Ungvary, The Siege of Budapest, p. 348.
26 Vera Goodkin, interview with the author.
27 Christian Ungvary, The Siege of Budapest, pp. 374-375.
28 Ibid., p. 255.
29 Erwin Koranyi, interview with the author.
30 Alice Breuer, interview with the author. It took a week to get to Szeged. “At one point I was trying to carry Alice on my shoulder, but she would not let me,” recalled Erwin. “That was a very difficult [time]. I was really desperate. When we got there, we rented a room, had a little bit of money, went to university, registered.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN. THE FALL
1 Claudia Steur, Theodor Dannecker: Ein Funktionar der “Endlosung,” Tubingen: Klartext, 1997, p. 225.
2 Dieter Wisliceny would be hanged in 1948. Veensenmayer, Winkelmann, and Kurt Becher would all avoid the death penalty. Thanks to Rudolph Kasztner, who appealed on his behalf, Becher was not even tried for war crimes. He would enjoy enormous success as a businessman in postwar Germany.
3 Peter Padfield, Himmler: Reichsfuhrer SS, Papermac, 1995, p. 145.
4 It is not known how Muller reacted. Nor is it known what happened to Muller after the war—he was one of only a handful of the most powerful Nazis to disappear without a trace as the Third Reich collapsed.
5 Jochen Von Lang, Eichmann Interrogated, Da Capo Press, New York, 1999, p. 257.
6 Roger Manvell and Heinrich Fraenkel, Heinrich Himmler, Greenhill Books, 2007, p .69.
7 Uki Goni, The Real Odessa, p. 296.
8 John Toland, The Last 100 Days, Random House, New York, 1965, p. 412.
9 Simon Wiesenthal, The Murderers Among Us, p. 99.
10 Jochen Von Lang, Eichmann Interrogated, p. 262.
11 Ibid., pp. 258-59.
12 Quentin Reynolds, Minister of Death, p. 189.
13 According to Neal Bascomb: “While Eichmann watched [his sons] play, little Dieter slipped and fell into the lake. Eichmann fished the boy out of the water, took him over his knee, and slapped him hard several times. While his son screamed, Eichmann told him never to go near the water again. He might never see his boys again, he reasoned: It was best to leave them with a bit of discipline. To his mind, this was the most a father could do for his children.” Neal Bascomb, Hunting Eichmann, p. 25.
14 Ibid.
15 This was indeed Kaltenbrunner’s fate. As the International News Service would report on October 16, 1946: “This was Ernst Kaltenbrunner. He entered the execution chamber at 1:36 a.m., wearing a sweater beneath his blue double-breasted coat. With his lean, haggard face furrowed by old dueling scars, this terrible successor to Reinhard Heydrich had a frightening look as he glanced around the room. He wet his lips, apparently in nervousness, as he turned to mount the gallows, but he walked steadily. He answered his name in a calm, low voice. When he turned around on the gallows platform, he first faced a United States Army Roman Catholic chaplain wearing a Franciscan habit. When Kaltenbrunner was invited to make a last statement, he said, ‘I have loved my German people and my fatherland with a warm heart. I have done my duty by the laws of my people and I am sorry my people were led this time by men who were not soldiers and that crimes were committed of which I had no knowledge. ’ This was the man, one of whose agents—a man named Rudolf Hoess—confessed at a trial that under Kaltenbrunner’s orders he gassed three million human beings at the Auschwitz concentration camp! As the black hood was raised over his head, Kaltenbrunner, still speaking in a low voice, used a German phrase which translated means, ‘Germany, good luck.’ His trap was sprung at 1:39 a.m. Field Marshal Keitel was pronounced dead at 1:44 a.m., and three minutes later guards had removed his body.” Source: http://www.mindfully.org/Reform/Nazi-Execution-Smith16oct46.htm.
16 John Toland, The Last 100 Days, p. 571.
17 “I myself returned from American captivity in November 1947, having been taken [as a] prisoner of war in Alt Aussee on May 14, 1945.” Source: http://www.nizkor.org/ftp.cgi/people/e/eichmann.adolf/ftp.py?people/e/eichmann.adolf//transcripts/Testimony-Abroad/Wilhelm_Hoettl-08.
18 Uki Goni, The Real Odessa, p. 296.
19 Jochen Von Lang, Eichmann Interrogated, p. 262.
20 Ibid.
21 Adolf Eichmann, Meine Flucht, Hessisches Hauptstaatsarchiv, Allierte Prozesse, 6/247, folder 1.
22 Guido Knopp, Hitler’s Hitmen, p. 39.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN. LOST HERO
1 Swedish White Papers, 1957.
2 In Budapest, Wallenberg had reportedly told Baroness Kemeny, on the day they last saw each other, that “If anything should happen to you, I have told Kollontai about you and the child.” Source: Kati Marton, Wallenberg: Missing Hero, p. 107.
3 Frederick E. Werbell and Thurston Clarke, Lost Hero, pp. 178-180.
4 Lars Berg, The Book That Disappeared, p. 215.
5 Frederick E. Werbell and Thurston Clarke, Lost Hero, pp. 179-181.
6 Source: http://info.jpost.com/C001/Supplements/Shoah/hol_Missing.html. Once on Soviet soil, these returnees were more often than not sent into its gulag, as was standard practice with any Soviet who had been tainted by contact with the capitalist West.
7 Ibid.
8 In recent years, it has been suggested that Wallenberg may have been associated with a super-secret intelligence organization, separate from the OSS, code-named Pond, which was run by a man named John Grombach as a private intelligence organization. Speculation that Wallenberg was some kind of operative, either for Pond or the OSS, increased when the CIA acknowledged in the early 1990s that Iver Olsen had worked for the OSS, the CIA’s predecessor, when he recruited Wallenberg for the Budapest mission. A 1979 State Department memo puts the question of Wallenberg’s links, or lack thereof, to American intelligence in the proper perspective: “Whether or not Wallenberg was involved with espionage during WWII is a moot point at this stage in history. His obvious humanitarian acts certainly outweigh any conceivable ‘spy’ mission he may have been on.” Source: http://info.jpost.com/C001/Supplements/Shoah/hol_Missing.html.
9 Decision to commence investigation into Katyn Massacre, Malgorzata Kuzniar-Plota, Departmental Commission for the Prosecution of Crimes against the Polish Nation, Warsaw, November 30, 2004.
10 Jozsef Gazsi, The Man They Honored Like Moses: Wallenberg pamphlets II, Budapest, 1995. It would not be until 1991 that Russian President Boris Yeltsin admitted Soviet responsibility for the massacre, which continues to poison Russian-Polish relations to this day. Had Wallenberg produced powerful evidence of Sov
iet culpability in 1945, there would have been a fierce media outcry in the West. And Stalin’s plans to subjugate all of Soviet-occupied Europe, including devastated Poland, would perhaps have been met with stronger opposition.
11 Per Anger, With Raoul Wallenberg in Budapest, p. 147.
12 Elenore Lester, Wallenberg: The Man in the Iron Web, p.131.
13 Dr. Vladim J. Birstein, “The Secret of Cell Number Seven,” Nezamisimaya Gazeta, April 25, 1991, p .4.
14 This allegedly happened on March 2, 1948. Source: Report of Swedish-Russian Working Group, 2000, pp. 111-112.
15 Source: http://info.jpost.com/C001/Supplements/Shoah/hol_Missing. html. In 1947, an official Soviet announcement stated that Wallenberg was not in the Soviet Union. In 1948, the Wallenbergs’ family friend, Alexandra Kollontay, was told that Wallenberg had died the previous year of a heart attack in prison. Source: Ibid.
16 Nina Lagergren, interview with the author.
17 Kati Marton, Wallenberg: Missing Hero, p. 161.
18 Sweden, like Switzerland, profited handsomely from neutrality. In 1998, a U.S. government inquiry would state that: “It was a generally held view among Allied economic warfare experts early in the war that the German war effort depended on iron ore from Sweden and oil from the Soviet Union, and that without these materials, the war would come to a halt.” Sweden had allowed Germans transit rights across its territory, and supplied vital ball bearings and even parts for the lethal V-2 rockets, which killed many innocent Londoners.
19 According to journalist Danny Smith: “One of the most audacious cloaking schemes between the Nazis and the Wallenbergs concerned the ‘acquisition’ of the American Bosch Corporation (ABC), a U.S. subsidiary of the Nazi German firm Robert Bosch GmbH. The Wallenbergs had allegedly agreed to return ABC to the Nazis after the war had ended with a German victory.” Source: Danny Smith, Lost Hero, p. 143.
20 The U.S. Treasury Department began to put together a case at Nuremberg. But the brothers once more benefited from their connections, this time to future Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, who allegedly stopped the investigation in the U.S. State Department. Source: Hugh Thomas, The Strange Death of Heinrich Himmler, St. Martin’s Press, New York, 2002, p. 88. See also “Red House Report,” 1999.
